Handbill Handout

To me, the sound of the 21st century is other people’s cell phone conversations. In the past, I’ ve actually transcribed one side of conversations I hear on the bus. While it wasn ’t as funny as say, the Monty Python “Size 12” bit it kept me amused while I commuted. Anyone who has to slog an hour or more each way back and forth to work can tell you that’s half the battle. The content of a really entertaining conversation is almost like a good musical improvisation: it starts off with a familiar melody, goes off into an interesting diversion and returns to the familiar at the end. Inevitably, the opener is either “I’m on the bus” or “ Waddayadoin ?” The latter in particular makes me cringe because it is a completely valueless question. The answer is obvious – “I’m talking to you, idiot”. If I’m lucky, the call will take an interesting turn from there before ending up with the familiar “OK, I’m going over the bridge, should be home in (whatever time)”. The interesting turn can be someth...

I need one of these .

There’s a woman I often see on my bus stop in the morning who I call “The Line Lady”. When she arrives at the stop she takes note of who is already there, and then she keeps track of those who arrive after her. When the bus arrives, she’s sure to usher everyone that was there ahead of her on to the bus first and then position herself to block anyone who arrived after she did. If anyone who arrives after she did eludes her and gets on before she does there’s a lot of “ tching ” and comments like “some people just can’t wait their turn!” Bear in mind, most mornings there are plenty of seats on the bus when it arrives at our stop (about halfway along the pickup route toward the Verrazano Bridge). Sometimes, just for fun I politely smile make her get on ahead of me when she’s arrived after I have. As you might imagine, she gets quite red-faced and stuttery over this. Almost as bad as she gets when someone gets on ahead of her. I guess it disrupts her vision of order for the universe. It...

Tonight I start the longest food-related project I've ever attempted: curing pork bellies . First, I cover them in sugar, salt, and spices and tuck them in the fridge until Saturday night. After I return from Saturday night curling they get cleaned off and then braised overnight in chicken stock. Finally, on Sunday I sear them off and eat. Fingers crossed that the process works like it should and we wind up with a fine, tasty Sunday entree. Speaking of eating, rumors abound that the fish in the $750,000 fish tank in the Staten Island ferry terminal are eating each other. Speaking of Staten Island, looks like we have our own culture war . That reminds me that we're about six weeks away from the annual human curling spectacular that follows the season-closing bonspiel and the ceremonial pulling-of-the-plug on the refrigeration system. Good thing we're in NJ and not SI otherwise The Man might shut it down. The highlight of the bonspeil is, of course, the Saturday pig roast...

The best radio station on the planet is having their annual two week fund raising drive this week and next. I pledged and in addition to the other awesome swag they give away I was selected as the winner of a genuine, five year old used transmitter tube, "complete with a certificate of inauthenticiy ". How cool is that? An older gentleman got on the R train last night and after sitting quietly for one stop asked a woman if the train went to the ferry. "Get off at Whitehall Street" he was told. "It's right there and it's only 3 more stops". The guy said thanks, and then as we passed stops he counted down to himself "2 stops", "1 stop" and then got off at Whitehall. This wouldn't be unusual except I saw the same guy do the same thing last week. He doesn't look like a kook. He's neatly dressed in worn work clothes: plaid shirt, blue khaki pants. Both times he was carrying a package wrapped in paper and tied with a strin...

One of my favorite days of the whole year is Trading Deadline Day in the NHL. In my younger days I would agonize over the moves and non-moves of the New York Rangers. I saw a few seasons flushed down the toilet due to action or inaction at the deadline (1996 leaps to mind - the infamous Ferraro- Norstrom - Laperriere -Lafayette for Kurri , Churla and McSorley deal which wound up being one of the worst deals in franchise history). Now, thanks to digital cable (God bless you NHL Network) and the Web I can follow full coverage of all the deals that all the teams make. And thanks to that coverage, I got to hear it first when my other favorite team, the Montreal Canadiens pulled the "What the f**k?" move of the day by giving away their starting goaltender for a draft pick One of these days I'll feel good about my favorite teams on this day. Then again, I felt good back in July and that hasn't quite panned out despite the fact that those guys have played pretty well mos...

I hate eggs as a stand alone food item although I do like things made from eggs. Despite this, I wound up eating eggs twice last weekend. The first serving of eggs came Friday night at wd 50 as part of a tasting menu. For those of you who aren't fans of Iron Chef and the like, Wylie Dufresne the chef/owner of wd 50 on the now-tourist-choked Lower East Side does all manner of interesting things with food under the not-very-well-liked label of "molecular gastronomy", which essentially is a catch-all term for a type of cooking where chefs use chemicals and cooking methods to take traditional food items or dishes, deconstruct them and present them in a different manner. So my first batch of eggs this weekend was "eggs Benedict " - essentially 2 cubes of egg yolk jello with 2 cubes of "fried mayonnaise", essentially 2 cubes of fried panko with a liquid center of mayo inside. Oh yeah, and there was some really tasty bacon chips with it. Still didn't l...